posting this before its completely finished so people can get started. last updated: 2026-06-22

a quick notes version of what to do, how to do, when to do. Some disclaimers out of the way:

• people have opinions, none of them right and all of them subjective
• what worked for one person with a specific set of skills, and specific market timing, may not work for another
• its always mostly luck, but for the ~25-40% time it isn't, you should be prepared
• this is geared towards SDE2+/senior/even staff roles. Leetcode is the same for everyone, while system design and story-telling expectations scale with seniority
• unfortunately being a good software engineer has little to do with being a good interviewee. my suggestion is to be honest and be a good software engineer first before you play the game and try to sell yourself than more than you are. Don't be like Neetcode.

Rough ordering of things

Typically, the entire process can take 3-6 months. You will study, apply, interview, fail, learn, and repeat. But with each failure, you should be getting great practice and get better at interviewing, increasing your chances of success when you start interviewing with harder companies you really want to work for. There are two streams: interview preparation, and job applications/scheduling. You can do a lot in parallel, but with a bias towards getting through the interview preparation stream first.

Interview preparation

Phase 1: Review data structures and algorithms

I like reading through the Cracking the coding interview chapters:

• Big O
• the entire Data Structures section (arrays, linked lists, stacks and queues, trees and graphs)
• Chapter on recursion and dynamic programming
• Chapter on sorting and searching

That's it. You don't need to grab the same book, but generally an overview of all of this is useful, no matter the source. I wouldn't bother with any of the technical questions or the advanced topic sections, since Gayle does a pretty bad job on anything that is slightly non-fundamental as those topics.

For the more advanced stuff, here are some videos I recommend:

• Kahn’s topsort: https://youtu.be/cIBFEhD77b4
• Dijkstra’s shortest path: https://youtu.be/pSqmAO-m7Lk
• Kruskal’s MST: https://youtu.be/JZBQLXgSGfs
• Union find: https://youtu.be/ibjEGG7ylHk

Most questions are going to be graph-related, and the hardest questions are generally some variation of graph or DP, so a couple more additional resources for review wouldn't hurt:

• Graph problems: https://youtu.be/tWVWeAqZ0WU
• Dynamic programming: https://youtu.be/oBt53YbR9Kk

Phase 2: System design study and Leetcode practice

If you have a lot of time, and actually care to be not only be good at interviewing but also successful at whatever comes next, read Designing Data Intensive Applications (2nd Edition). Else I would suggest going through one of the resources in: Tech Interview Handbook – System Design. I only have experience with Grokking the system design interview (I will have a mirror up for this soon, check back later).

At the same time, start on Leetcode, my go-to is Blind 75 (I do 50 questions, but you can do the full 75). Go through these questions multiple times, and at least once before your first technical screen.

I split my time between LC and studying system design. Prioritize LC, while studying system design once fatigued.

Phase 3: Review and repeat

While interviewing (phase 3 of Job Applications and later), keep repeating the same set of LC questions for practice, identify gaps in technical and system design rounds, and keep filling the gaps.

Job applications

Phase 1: Make a list

It may feel counter-intuitive to start with a list of companies before having a resume, but I have found it helps seeing job descriptions (JD) of roles that interest and excite me, to later use that context in anchoring my resume. One important caveat is you never really stop adding new companies to the list. Sifting through job sites more often than not ends up being a weekly thing you do, adding new companies and roles to your list as you go. But as an initial seeding step, make a 4-tiered list of companies:

1. Target companies – You already know that you would work for them if you got an offer
2. Tier 1 – The hardest of the interviews, the highest of the pays. Many times the companies that end up here and not in Target are ones that are in cities you don't want to relocate, or you find ethically gross.
3. Tier 2 – Mid-sized companies. Typically tech-first companies that have been around a while, but doesn't pay as high as tier 1
4. Tier 3 – any other companies, and early-stage startups if you don't want paper money.

A note on interviewing with companies you don't care to work for: the last time I was interviewing, I actually took an offer from a mid-stage startup I had no intention to work for going into the interviewing process. But I ended up liking the team and opportunities, and they even changed their original role to allow for remote so I didn't have to relocate. That happens a lot, so its a win-win for interviewers-interviewee. Worst/best case you get good practice, or you end up liking a company you wouldn't have considered otherwise.

Once you have your list, start going through the career page of each to find roles you would want to apply to, scan the JD to get an idea of skills in demand, and save it to your list.

Phase 2: Prep your resume

How to write a good resume is beyond the scope of this article, but write a great resume. When confused about how to frame or what to keep on your resume, remind yourself of all the JDs you reviewed in the previous step and draw inspiration from there. Get your resume reviewed. It can take weeks to have a good resume assuming you have good people reviewing it, so plan for it.

Phase 3: A/B resume, A/B self

Start applying to Tier 3 companies on your list. Don't do them all in one week. Test drive by applying to a few places, and see if you receive good response on your resume. If you see yourself get less than 50% acceptance, there may be something wrong with your resume, or that it isn't good enough for the role/level you are going for and its back to Phase 2.

Phase 4: Behavioral Preparations

Write up common questions that come up and your answers to each. This will come in handy as you learn how to effectively communicate during your interviews. Some starter questions:

• Tell me about yourself
• Why are you looking to change jobs?
• What are you looking for in a new role?
• Your best/most impactful project in the past year/recently?
• etc.

Add more to this list as you see common questions come up.

Phase 5: Move up the tiers

Once you have solid grasp on technical, design interview, practiced stories, and a solid resume that gets accepted more often than not, keep applying to higher and higher tiers on your list. Expect to apply to at least 40 different roles, possibly 75 for your best chances. Have at least 10 onsites before expecting offers. It's luck and practice, and you want your best chances.

more to come

I sat down one afternoon and wrote this up without review. I will come back and update it time to time until its organized in a manner I can be proud of and move this to a more formal place. thanks for reading, and good luck!

extras: I found this random blind thread really useful, and took a lot of curated resources from there: 7 onsites 7 offers

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As my audience in the real world has grown, so has the inquiry of “do you have a twitter account”. And I have always said, “well stay tuned I plan to start a website to share a lot of the things I have learned in life”. That has been going on for the last four years. I had a long weekend from work with no plans, and it was Ramadan, so I had some time to reflect... basically life stuff. And figured now is the time as any to dive right in, and make a proper blog. I have floated a lot of ideas over the years, on how I can give back and help people at scale, and what's next is for me to slowly lay down the foundations for all of it. And then failing and learning and improving.

Staying with the nature of pages, I'm going to end on that note of misformed thoughts. This was all just a long unwinding way to announce that I am finally starting a blog/website/platform/community over at sadman, expect posts about all facets of life. I don't think it will amount to much, but if there is even one person who might benefit I have convinced myself it is worth the effort.

If you like anything I have written, have said, taught or interested, would love to have you as a follower, while I share my learnings on the path.

To stay up to date, be sure to follow @sadman@pages.sadmansk.com on the fediverse!

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Then a time came when I could. And very quickly, my collection of instruments and gear grew, and there was no stopping me. It took me a few years of endlessly buying new things to realize that music stopped being a hobby for me, instead my hobby became... buying music gear. I barely played music anymore, instead got caught up watching YouTube videos of gear, shopping, watching: an endless cycle that produced nothing of real value or growth.

The thing that didn't click to me immediately starts with the fact that all of these people I was watching are doing this for a living. They don't necessarily have malicious intent of appeasing sponsors and get people to spend money, but they are making money of the craft, most doing it full-time. They have a lot of time on their hands when music (or YouTubing or both) is their career. When they justify the value of a gear that's \$\$\$\$, they are taking into consideration how much time they themselves are going to invest using that piece of gear. Me as a hobbyist who can barely make time is not gonna get the same use out of it.

Sure, the financial investment aspect of it sounds obvious, it always has been for me as well. But that wasn't the kicker, it was time. Spending so much time in the cycle of watching and shopping, I barely spent time actually playing or creating or learning music. Shopping was my hobby now, not music.

I fell into the same trap again in recent weeks. This time it was with productivity YouTube. After binging some of the biggest and respected names in the space, I noticed that they pose a similar trap. They jump straight into how to optimize your life so you can ascend, maybe even create content for other people. Most of us are trying to organize life in significantly smaller steps. We don't need to use 10 different (paid!) apps to create a second brain. What we need, to start off at the very least, is learn how to use a calendar, a todo list, and notes in a streamlined workflow. And then, for most if not all laymen, maybe you can invest in a zettelkasten system, and further streamline existing tools. Many of us don't have the mental capacity to handle all these tools and processes at the end of our work day to organize our personal life. Many of us don't have the luxury of attaching our personal life growth and organization directly with our career on YouTube.

Ultimately, I realize now that if I am looking for “expert” advice on anything, and learn from others, in most cases it can't be from (full-time) influencers. I'd compare it to the educational system. You learn a lot of whats in school, largely in topics that may not be useful. And without the correct guidance for a kid, you don't really know what you need to learn. You barely know what you are trying to let alone need to achieve. It's a similar story with full-time educational influencers. I keep seeing this trend across topics that they have lost touch with what would actually help the layman, instead focusing too much on what people are gonna be engaged on, without getting real value out of. When I have only a few hours to spare on music, I'm much better off learning songs and recording them, but the content is made for the three people that work with music for a living, who have a lot more time to spare.

In my opinion, we need more hobbyist content creators to help out other hobbyists, not influencers. But live long enough, you might too become the villain.

To stay up to date, be sure to follow @sadman@pages.sadmansk.com on the fediverse!

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It's something that might not amount to anything, or I might not even stick to it, but it feels like a small enough time investment that if it helps me build a new habit or two it will be very worth it. I have yet to figure out what would be a good medium to record my weeks, as I have been flipping between digital and physical journals. That sounds like a good thing to figure out this weekend as I explore options in both realms :'D.

To stay up to date, be sure to follow @sadman@pages.sadmansk.com on the fediverse!

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For some time, I did rely on RSS but that kind of fell off, I don't quite remember how. The reason must have been due to never building a proper habit of reading it. I recent discovered dashy, a self-hosted customizable landing page, and got the idea that perhaps I can transform that as a place where I can spend several minutes at the start of my day catching up on what's going on. My thoughts on this are still very very rough but here are some ideas I wanted to throw to see what sticks:

1. Dashy: it can contain multiple RSS feeds based on filters, like news, tech blogs, subreddits, etc. Moreover it gives me the opportunity to build embedded dashboards on information on markets (stocks and real-estate), my Garmin activities, tasks and calendar, etc. These are just a couple quick ideas.
2. Instapaper + Kindle: Having to look at the screen for 8 hours or more in a day for work, I invested in getting both a kindle and a remarkable tablet last year. Any long-form articles I may want to read, I send it to instapaper with a browser extension and have them delivered at certain intervals to my kindle.

There is certainly a lot more potential, and I suspect as I start building some of these workflows out for me, more ideas would inevitably come.

To stay up to date, be sure to follow @sadman@pages.sadmansk.com on the fediverse!

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Now that that's out of the way, one of the issues I encountered when I was on twitter was that people have a lot of views on different topics, and as a follower I may be interested in certain topics and their views on it, and not so much in others. As an example, let's say I am really interested in the book recommendations from Elon Musk. But do I care about his BS with Tesla or cryptocurrency and him exploiting his fanboys? Nopeeee. Or another one could be is that someone is interested in my music-related or CS career-related tweets, but not my political or religious views. The issue with not having that distinction imo is:

My very draft thoughts on a possible solution is that creators should have the option to post to channels. Currently the process for a creator is to have multiple accounts, which is pretty bad. The concept of channels should be an evolved form of hashtags, where creators can post to multiple channels (at the same time), and consumers can follow one or more channels from any creators.

To stay up to date, be sure to follow @sadman@pages.sadmansk.com on the fediverse!

My social links: https://twit.dispersio.us/@sadman https://linkedin.com/in/sadmansk

Even though my habit of reading books I will admit I did not read the article with much attention initially when I came across it over a year ago. Complacency struck again. I focused on learning more about Zettleskasten instead, and how I could use those principles to build up my own system. I started off by using Roam Research, and it went great for a week or so. That was followed by trying out different tools (mostly open source ones) on and off for months till I realized that complacency struck yet again. As I was reading books and articles, I often stopped at information I wanted to note down for the future me, only to get disheartened by the fact that I still hadn't established a good note taking system. The latest of my triumphs was to re-read the Shopify director's article and employ his terminal-based tool. However, the task of learning both the tool and Zettletskasten principles, whilst still trying to figure out how I can build a system that works for me proved to be too daunting.

Well, for now, I am going to stop using lack of proper tooling as an excuse, and just use what I have available till I understand my needs better. I ended up going back to Roam to have a system that I can later export my data from into a system I build that works for me.

To stay up to date, be sure to follow @sadman@pages.sadmansk.com on the fediverse!

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It was the year I finally stopped focusing a majority of my efforts in my career. I changed my mindset to “live to work” instead of “work to live”. That's not to say I lost my ambitions, I still chased down my career growth, but only “during work”.

live to work

There was a lot of movement in my life outside of just work, I moved into a place of my own and started living just by myself. I was finally able to indulge in my home decor obsession. That ultimately lead to learning a lot about what I like, what I care about and what makes me happy. But throughout more than half of the year, my focus and life still mostly revolved around work as I was chasing down a promotion. I felt burnt out, and started thinking a lot about what I even want to do career wise. The run was great, don't get me wrong. I was able to pick up a lot of skills, and learned a lot about what engineering in the real world actually is (spoiler alert: it's not algorithms or what they tend to teach at school). I greatly improved (imho) my document writing skills, being an active participant of a team with largely people more senior than me, as well as how to approach (and find solutions to) ambiguous software engineering problems. It was a fantastic year in terms of learning. But even a better year for realizations for what makes me happy.

work to live

I didn't know a lot of people in this city I moved into the year a priori before the pandemic hit. So social distancing resulted in me looking for entertainment in solidarity. I rediscovered my interest in my (non-technical) hobbies long forgotten, like reading books and playing music. The amount of satisfaction I got indulging in these made me realize that my priority in working hard was misplaced. I even put my technical hobbies on the back-burner since I figured throughout college they have gotten enough attention. To be completely honest, dissociating work for the sake of work and instead seeing work as a way to fund my life has been pretty good. I used to be worried that if I was not super passionate about my work I would not be feel the drive to excel in my work. But I have pleasantly discovered that making the distinction between living life and working has not affected my drive for career growth. I have started to feel that investing in my hobbies provides me with perspectives that give me unique insights into solving problems at work, especially reading (non-technical books included).

looking forward

Balance is key in making a content life. Too much time in leisure is just as harmful as spending too much time at work. I do feel a bit overwhelmed at times with the amount of ongoing life projects and hobbies I want to indulge in. Certain hobbies has certainly suffered during the pandemic, like fitness routines, and being more healthy in general. And there are yet even more hobbies I want to invest more time in, such as writing, reading books (most of my reading has been articles), photography, cooking, plants! ughh...

I think it's essential for me to build better habits around life come 2021 (tbh, at the time of writing this part we are nearing the end of 2021...) to make room for more in life, have more structure, lose less of life to meta-time.

To stay up to date, be sure to follow @sadman@pages.sadmansk.com on the fediverse!

My social links: https://twit.dispersio.us/@sadman https://linkedin.com/in/sadmansk

Obligatory disclaimer: I cannot speak for other fields, but it does seem that a lot of these aspects are common among them. But this is just a snippet of what I have observed in big tech, sample size of me and a lot of my friends, peers and colleagues.

I take pride in having career goals and working towards them. Anything from: I want to be a senior in X years, I want to be a principal in Y years to I want to have achieved some measurable impact within my Z months/years on the team. Goals can be big, ideally objective, but they can be subjective, chase what you want, we are not talking about “good” or “bad” goals here, goals are goals.

For me, they are milestones in life. I track them not only for my career, but my life in general, my hobbies, my side hustles: everything. They inspire me, so I chase them. This is a wild tangent, so let's get back to the topic of my passion of career growth.

As I have been building habits, targeting smaller deliverables, in order I meet the next milestone in my career progression, I discovered something: career growth has very, very little to do with you or your capability, it has way more to do with opportunities you get.

Let's start with a simple example: imagine you are at a startup. Everything moves fast, new components need to be built every week! You are a junior on the team, you have been on the team only for a few months but your product scope is quite small. Things need to be built, they are complicated, but with your coding expertise and context of the system, your team trusts you to build a new component. You deliver, you get a point. You gather enough of these points you graduate to the next level in your career. You have built both big and small solutions due to the rate at which these opportunities come to the team. It doesn't matter if they weren't built right, or if it might do more damage due to an oversight in the design. You already have the points and a couple of years down the line no one will remember it was your faults things are broken.

Now imagine working on a bigger company. You work on an established system that is used by customers, a lot of them. There isn't much bandwidth to build more things as you are constantly focused on improving your service operationally. These changes are not as sexy, they can take weeks of investigation trying to gather context around your own service because of its complexity; and result in three lines of code or config change. They may be more technically complicated but they don't seem that way, because at the end the presentation of your contribution is those three lines of change, which sometimes don't have direct metrics with them since them being part of a bigger change. Before you know it, you have been on the team for a couple of years and you haven't written a single design doc. When asked about your contribution, you know that you objectively improved the quality of service you provide to your customers, but these are small changes here and there that are not easily presentable. You may be asked, “Have you designed a complicated system or component?” and your answer being “No but I have operationally improved our system through blah blah” does not sound that sexy. A manager whose team is relatively new starts bragging about their recent report's promotion, talking about how so and so wrote this new system that does something big for their service of a few thousands of lines. Upper management is impressed. Working on a newer team/product is similar to working on a startup. You get to work on “exciting” and “sexy” features that are presentable. It doesn't matter how much talent is required, it matters how presentable the end result is.

I have seen a culture in these places: everything is opportunity driven. How good you are does not matter at all after a certain point. If you find yourself on a team that builds products for large number of customers, you may find yourself in a similar situation. Opportunities for presentable contributions will not show up often, and when they do you have to compete against your peers who are also trying to get promoted. Here are some things I have learned the hard way I wish someone told me before:

1. Record and document everything you do. No matter how small. Don't get trapped by thinking your contribution is small, think about the big picture that your solution contributes to and frame your document in a way to capture and present that eloquently.
2. Be aggressive in taking credits. In the past I have been personally hurt by this, when I was too shy to present my work and one of my peers who I worked with presented it to get the recognition instead of me
3. Proactively seek out opportunities. Don't wait for your manager to say you are ready, if you think you are ready, ask for it. If a manager/team fails to meet your timeline, consider finding a different job/team/manager.
4. Understand the criteria for the next level of your career growth, in your organization/department or the larger company. You will encounter managers who don't understand these differences and think your contributions are not enough, not every manager has worked on a real customer facing product. Make sure your manager recognizes the work that you did and fights against these other managers who only consider “sexy” changes as next-level.

To stay up to date, be sure to follow @sadman@pages.sadmansk.com on the fediverse!

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This is a very old rant I wrote in 2016. Before the Cambridge anaylitica scandal became public. Long before today, when people are more aware of the dire state of the world than ever, and Facebook's public image has fallen out of favor.

There are two possibilities here. Either we have been caught in an information bubble so restrictive that it appears that some types of news are being censored from us. The other possibility here, the scary one, is that these companies are specifically censoring the news. The latter one is particularly interesting to look at now that Facebook explicitly blocks entire pages of organizations that support a specific political platform. Or when you could not upload that one anti-DNC photo to Facebook.

I mean I totally understand why we don't think it's that big of a deal, even if it's true. One could argue (you probably will) that people who care about news should just go to a news site and catch up on world events. But what about the people who don't? The people who don't know that there is something to care for? It's one thing to drive your platform to make sure Hillary Clinton gets the presidency over Donald Trump, it's another thing to actively censor out one of the biggest humanitarian crisis of our generation just because. I know everyone has their priorities: some people have to focus on their careers so that they can make the world a better place, some people would rather watch funny 9GAG videos than look at things that may displease or discomfort them, etc.; sadly, some people actively just dismisses that something this cruel might be happening. Again it is understandable why we are so quick to dismiss that people are being tortured, imprisoned, killed, and their lives destroyed when our most trustworthy and credible “friend” censors them, damaging the credibility of those reports to the general public.

I have a problem with Hillary Clinton, but I don't care that much when sites like Facebook and Google bends the support toward her. But I do have a problem when they get caught promoting pro-occupation and blocking media sites that cover the other side of the wall. These are lives of people we are talking about. This is about children with no childhoods or a promise of a better future. This is about people who know that the world has forsaken them, and they are totally right. Their story needs to be told. But it's all good because it was just a small mistake, oops.

Not even surprised anymore that so many people I know think that we are living in the most peaceful of times just because we are not stuck behind walls or being bombed every other day.

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